I wrote down all my reasons for not blogging. Paragraphs of them. The reasons had reasons I couldn’t go into. But good news: I was going to blog again. I missed it, I said. This happened a few times. Don’t tell me how many. I think it was three? Let’s say it was three.

But I didn’t miss blogging enough. Or maybe I’m a tease. Someone even suggested I’m over it, but I haven’t found my next adventure. I’m refusing to break up with this blog until something cuter that doesn’t know all my stories comes along.

I wrote down all my reasons for not blogging. Paragraphs of them. The reasons had reasons I couldn’t go into. But good news: I was going to blog again. I missed it, I said. This happened a few times. Don’t tell me how many. I think it was three? Let’s say it was three.

But I didn’t miss blogging enough. Or maybe I’m a tease. Someone even suggested I’m over it, but I haven’t found my next adventure. I’m refusing to break up with this blog until something cuter that doesn’t know all my stories comes along.

It’s always hard to explain to my friends from the Northeast that I grew up where Christianity was compulsory. Everyone believed in God and our lord and personal savior Jesus Christ, because…

Just because.

It’s how everything was explained and not explained. Things that didn’t make sense were part of a plan we were too small to see.

I can’t pinpoint the moment when I went from a confident, inquisitive kid to a self-conscious adolescent, but I think God must have been at the root. One day I went from believing in Him, because it’s what everyone did, to doubting such a being could exist. And if there were some sort of God, I was skeptical that He or She or It would hold some of the beliefs that everyone said He or She or It did.

It’s as simple as this: On the one hand, as a creature of the postwar, baby-boom, women’s-movement times of the latter half of the twentieth century, I grew up defining myself as an independent, self-supporting woman. I don’t even question it. It’s my identity, it’s my economic reality, and it’s my right. I depend on my independence.